Michael Slade is the pseudonym of Vancouver trial lawyer Jay Clarke. In Hangman, Clarke teams up with daughter Rebecca Clarke to produce the eighth installmant in his highly successful “Special X Psycho Thriller” series.

In keeping with the Slade tradition, Hangman is populated with complex characters and features a realistic – if somewhat reverant – portrayal of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Returning to the “Special X” series is RCMP Inspector Zinc Chandler, who finds himself in Seattle staking out a wrongly aquitted, jury-tampering doctor dubbed “The Lady Killer.” By chance, Chandler stumbles upon a gruesome crime scene: a woman is found hanged, her right leg severed in gruesome imitation of the hangman game. When the Lady Killer’s mistress is found dead in Vancouver, Chandler teams up with a Seattle detective to track down the noose-wielding, cross-border killer.

The book’s escalating suspense is sustained not only by readers wondering “whodunnit,” but who will be the next to die – every character is both a suspect and a potential victim. And as is usual for a Slade novel, the gory action is supported by an incredible amount of research into police and legal procedure. Doubling as both a savagely gruesome thriller and an indictment of the justice system, Hangman walks a fine line between lowbrow trash and highbrow thriller. What emerges might be termed “high trash,” an inventive, occasionally hilarious horror-mystery that delivers the goods by the bloody bagfull.